Eadred took the orb into his hands. Something glimmered inside, a tiny star tingling in his palms. His heart began to pound as a force gripped his chest, swirling, writhing, searching. Stars, whales, sun and moon. Her wrath boomed across time, shredding the veil. Terns, seals, white horses roaming the cliffs. She wept in the oldest tongue, her grief and desperation raising tempests. The dead, their pale eyes staring. Her child was gone. She crashed the Gates, sending them soaring end over end into the stars. Then she turned, her emerald slitted eyes fixing on Eadred as she raced, spiraling in a black, spiky maelstrom toward the wound in his heart left by a witch.
WIZARD, she roared, splitting sea from shore. – From The Gray Isles
As any writer will tell you, characters in stories take on lives of their own. Imbued with the forces of creation, the psyche is immensely arcane, and the act of creating something, whether it’s music, a painting, a garden, a book — anything, really — is always a bit mysterious. As for characters in a novel, they have a way of appearing in the writer’s imagination of their own accord, with their own agendas. To me, it feels as if they exist already, in a story that’s happening somewhere, and I’m just tapping into it.
The main protagonist driving the books in the Chronicles of Ealiron is one Lorth of Ostarin, a wizard and elite assassin in service to the Keepers of the Eye, an ancient order of wizards who keep balance in the world. He is sent on assignment to a remote northern archipelago called the Gray Isles to discover why another in his order, a fey, volatile wizard named Eadred, broke his vows to the Eye in an egregious breach of conduct he never explained or attempted to defend. Lorth’s task of getting Eadred to tell him what happened, however, goes straight to hell at the outset, spiraling into a manhunt, a costly encounter with a sea monster, and some nasty backwater politics.
With long hair the color of snow, eyes the color of reindeer lichen and a silvery breath of Elven blood in his veins, Eadred is a powerful rogue element, a trickster whose tormented machinations have gained him great knowledge which he uses to help prevent a rising cataclysm. But aside from Eadred’s having been cursed by a witch and later banished to the isles, we never learn the specific events that drove him to forsake his wizard’s mantle and leave a trail of bloodshed and woe over two realms.
Ealiron: The Gray Isles
For years, I thought about pulling Eadred’s backstory from the shadows and writing it into the book, but all I got were vague impressions, almost as if his past was hidden from me and Lorth alike. The book felt incomplete, somehow, until earlier this year, when the mists cleared and I saw not only the old wounds and workings of Eadred’s mind, but also the rugged string of events that made him the madman who appears in the original edition of the book. In a fury I wrote it down, wove it in, had the whole work beautifully edited, and the third edition was born. Huzzah.
For the record, I’ve added this to my Hah! Fuck You 2020 list. It’s a short list, but hey, we’ll take what we can get.
Stay tuned, and stay well.
© F.T. McKinstry 2020. All Rights Reserved.
Frogs are a staple of fairy tales. Witches tend to traffic with them; a handy, unattractive shape for a handsome prince or worse, an ingredient in a simmering cauldron. Of themselves, frogs have an otherworldly air, dwelling on the borders of earth and water, calling for rain.
I have a great deal of respect for spiders. They are good at what they do and they are elegant about it. A common human phobia is named after them as a result. It’s a primordial thing. I wouldn’t harm a spider out of hand, but if one got on me I would scream like the girl I am and not be ashamed.
I once kept a ribbon snake named Kali. I knew she was female because she gave birth shortly after I acquired her. Extraordinary creature; smooth as silk, silent, patient, and breathtakingly fast when she wanted to be. She ate live goldfish.
I’m an aquarium geek. If you ever want to discover firsthand how smart nature is, try setting up a tank with fishes and live plants and keep them thriving. In the natural world, there is a balance between them, a symbiotic relationship that depends on countless variables difficult to replicate. I don’t look at my pond in quite the same way anymore. I am in awe of it.
A raven is not exactly creepy or crawly, unless you consider that birds evolved from reptiles. But like the snake or the spider, the raven gets points for being emotionally controversial. Mythology and literature abound with raven lore, associating these birds with wolves, death and trickery. Dark, mysterious and incredibly intelligent, the raven is also linked with healing and initiation, processes that tend to usher mortals into the void.
F.T. McKinstry 
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